![Black and white photo of crowd protesting with raised fists and holding signs "police pay off"](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/J24mwNWStPMMFABsaI8_NW38UL0=/397x0:1730x1333/80x80/media/img/2023/11/WEL_TrumpPackage_LewisMadLeft/original.png)
listen to this article
Hear more stories curio
teahe's a trump bitch It had a radical impact on the American right. But to be honest, they also completely turned the corner and sent a lot of people to the left. Some liberals, especially upper-middle-class whites, are angry because they failed to see what was obvious to others: Trump is a bad candidate and an even worse president.
At first, liberals tried established tactics like sit-ins and legal challenges. Lawyers and activists gathered to protest the administration's Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked an early version. But soon the sheer volume of anger overwhelmed Trump's critics, and the self-proclaimed resistance became a pattern of dramatic, low-impact outrage.
Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump's policies or expose the hollowness of his promises, the insurgents simply wanted him gone. Many on the left have argued that he is not a legitimate president and is only in the White House because of Russian interference. As always, social media has made everything worse. Resistance became #resistance. Instead of focusing on the hard work of door-knocking and community action, members tweeted to the chorus, making no distinction between Trump's eccentric comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina (impeachment, the 25th Amendment, pee tapes, human rights abuses). cub—led to Trump's departure from office, and growing frustration as successive news cycles failed to lift the scales in the eyes of his supporters. Opponents wisely understood this trend and coined the phrase “Orange Man Bad” to summarize it.
President Trump was a failure of the right-wing elite. Republicans underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could beat him in the primary. When he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and take a servile attitude in public. But the Trump era has also revealed the failures of the left. Trump has created a vast reservoir of political energy, but that energy has too often been misdirected. Many liberals turned inward and found solace in self-help and purification rituals. They may have to share the country with those who will vote for the Orangeman, but they can also purge their Facebook feeds, friendship groups, and even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and those who are not liberal enough. Feeling extremely threatened, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues like removing the names of the Founding Fathers from school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors, insisting that ambivalence was not an option. (They didn’t even participate in the debate, because “silence is violence.”) Deviating from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failure, not a political difference.
The cataclysms of 2020 (the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd) may have shattered the left’s illusions. Instead, resisters buried their heads deeper in the sand. Although health experts have argued that anyone who breaks social distancing rules is selfish, they have decided that attending protests is more important than complying with COVID-19 restrictions (at least for the causes they support). A white woman's book on 'white fragility' became a bestseller in the summer of 2020, but negotiations over comprehensive police reform legislation collapsed the following year. As conservative Supreme Court justices lay the groundwork for repeal Roe vs. Wade, an activist organization obsessed with purifying the language. (As of 2021, the ACLU is now defunct. I rewrote the famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote. To remove the word about abortion female.) Demoralized, disorganized, and having given up hope of changing the minds of Trump supporters, the left flexed its muscles in the few spaces where it held power: the liberal media, publishing, and academia.
If we attempted to criticize this trend, the answer was simple. Aboutism: Why not focus on Trump? The answer, of course, was that a bad government required strong opposition, seeking converts rather than hunting down heretics. Many of the most interesting Democratic politicians to emerge during this period include CIA veteran Abigail Spanberger of Virginia; Raphael Warnock, a Baptist pastor in Georgia; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who promised to “fix our damn roads,” was a pragmatist who flipped a red territory blue. In the 2020 election, Democrats ultimately nominated a moderate candidate who was most likely to beat Trump.
But it was hardly a given that Joe Biden would win as the party's nominee. He defeated more progressive rivals for the Democratic nomination only after a comeback in the South Carolina primary. Exit polls showed he was ahead of his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, by 44 points. That's no coincidence. These voters recognized that they could get much more from a candidate like Biden who regularly talks about working with Republicans than from the activist wing of the party. As Biden put it in response to civil unrest across American cities in August 2020: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for the mob?”
Biden is older now, so a second victory is not guaranteed. If he loses, the challenge to American democratic norms will be enormous. Twitter's decline may hinder Trump's ability to dominate the news cycle as effectively as last time, but he will likely become more committed to enriching himself and seeking revenge. I hope the left has learned its lesson and will look outward rather than inward. The fight isn't about controlling Bud Light's advertising strategy or who gets published. new york timesBut we oppose gerrymandering and election interference, we oppose women being imprisoned for abortion, we oppose transgender Americans being denied access to health care, we oppose domestic abusers being able to buy guns, and we oppose police brutality going unpunished. Oppose, oppose the empowerment of white nationalists, ban books.
The way for America to come back to its senses lies in persuasion. It is to protect freedom of speech and the rule of law, clearly and calmly oppose Trump's abuse of power, and present an attractive alternative. The left cannot afford to do crazy things at the very moment America needs it most.
This article January/February 2024 A print edition titled “The Left Can’t Afford to Be Angry.”